Saturday, October 24, 2015

A Horror Film to Skip: ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’

Kenneth Branagh as Dr. Frankenstein (left) and Robert De Niro as the Monster in ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein’

Last
October, to help everyone get in the mood for the holiday, I wrote a Halloween-themed post about my favorite horror film, Jack Clayton’s The Innocents (1961). This year, I thought that I would write another about — all
things considered — my least favorite horror film. Although I’m sure that I could find other would-be
chillers that are more wanting in subject matter and/or craftsmanship, the
film that I would like to write about is, given the talent and resources
lavished on it, perhaps the biggest missed opportunity in the history of
cinema. The name of this
monstrosity more horrifying in execution than intention? Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), directed by Kenneth Branagh.

Director-star Kenneth Branagh as Dr. Victor Frankenstein

Adapting Mary Shelley’s 1818 classic as a
follow-up to Francis Ford Coppola’s very successful Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992 — which one critic dubbed
the most expensive high-school play in history), Branagh’s Frankenstein boasts a large budget and a very
talented cast, not the least of whom is Robert De Niro in the role of the
Monster. Since many adaptations of
the Shelley novel show no fidelity to its period or setting (at least two
productions transplanted the story to Britain), I was very pleased to see
Branagh’s film fixed firmly in the late 18th century (the period of
the Enlightenment) and Dr. Frankenstein’s status as an outsider by making him a
Swiss national (Shelley’s novel was famously written in Switzerland) studying
in nationalistic Ingolstadt, Germany. For buffs
of German literature, Friedrich Schiller even makes a cameo appearance
(although the real Schiller was probably nowhere near Ingolstadt at the
time).

With
sumptuous costumes evoking the late 18th century and a very
accomplished cast, Branagh’s film had a lot going for it. Unfortunately, he chooses to emphasize
the melodramatic aspects of the novel with breakneck pacing, shovel-on-the-head
dialogue, and a constantly swirling soundtrack that hardly ever lets up. In fact, Branagh’s Frankenstein is almost wall-to-wall music, as
though the filmmaker feared that any let-up in the orchestral score would put
the audience to sleep. (The first time I
first saw this Frankenstein at the Writers’ Guild Theater in Beverly Hills, when the
composer’s name, the otherwise distinguished Patrick Doyle, appeared on the
screen, the audience broke out into jeers — the only time I’ve ever known that
to happen to a composer.)

Robert De Niro as the Monster

Actor-director
Branagh himself plays Dr. Victor Frankenstein, which may have had something to
do with his not being able to view the project from a more comprehensive
distance. De Niro’s Monster looks
more like a badly scarred human rather than anything especially frightening, so
we’re less understanding of the townspeople’s horrific reactions to him. It would have been appreciated had
there been some other element to his appearance (such as his flat head in the
Boris Karloff movies for Universal Pictures) to make the Monster more … well … monstrous.

Branagh’s
Frankenstein
rushes from one plot point to the next in an apparent effort to cram all of its
material into the movie without running overtime. There’s little sense of the film pausing long enough to
allow the viewer (or even the characters) to absorb the proceedings. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is one of those rare films that
might have actually been better had it been longer (and less melodramatic) and given more time for its
narrative to unfold.

And to
top it all off, the script — by Steph Lady and The Shawshank Redemption’s Frank Darabont — wallops the
viewer with spell-it-out-for-you dialogue that leaves no doubt about the
characters’ actions and incitements.
Here, Victor Frankenstein is given a mother who dies in childbirth to
spur his experiments to prolong life indefinitely. One scene
has Victor laying flowers on his mother’s grave, saying, “Oh, Mother, you should
never have died. No one need ever
die. I will stop this. I will stop
this. I promise” — lest we have any doubt what his driving
force is. The scene might as well have had a sign light up in the background saying
“CHARACTER’S MOTIVATION.”

To watch
Branagh’s Frankenstein is also to wonder how such a richly pedigreed film got so much
wrong. Rather than playing up the
melodrama, I wish that the movie had gone in the other direction and observed
its goings-on with a Kubrickian sense of detail and understatement. The scene of Victor at his mother’s
grave needed no dialogue, and I think that the scene could have been more
rewarding by allowing the viewers to put Victor’s (rather obvious) motivation together for
themselves.

John Cleese as Dr. Robert Waldman

The only
real reason to watch Branagh’s Frankenstein — other than to luxuriate in the
production values and wish they were expended on a better movie — is to witness
Monty Python alum John Cleese in a rare dramatic turn, in this case in the role of Dr.
Robert Waldman, the titular scientist’s mentor. But even here, as good as it is to catch Cleese in anything, I would still like to have seen
an important supporting part like Dr. Waldman go to Christopher Lee as a
tribute to his role as the Monster in The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), one of the first of
Hammer Films’s horror series from the 1950s through ’70s.

At the start, I called Branagh’s Frankenstein my least favorite horror film.
Where other misfires of the genre can sometimes make me laugh at their
inept attempts to frighten the viewer or at least make me appreciate the movie as an artifact of its time, Branagh’s film only makes me sad. As I watch such
lavishly costumed characters spouting hyperbolic dialogue written by scribes who have
proven their worth on other projects, I’m filled with a sense of sorrow for what
might have been.